Danner vs. Kinsley on the Memo and the War

On May 15, Tomdispatch posted a piece Mark Danner wrote for the New York Review of Books on the Downing Street Memo, the first of a string of secret documents leaked to the Times of London from the upper reaches of the British government, which cumulatively offered an unprecedented look inside the Bush administration as it was preparing, 8 months ahead of time, to prosecute a war against Iraq. By the time Danner wrote his piece, the memo, released by the London Times on May 1, had already sped around the Internet, but had still not seen the print light-of-day in the United States. Neither the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, nor the Washington Post thought the notes of a meeting of Tony Blair's war cabinet in which the head of M16, the British equivalent of the CIA director, discusses recent high-level private talks in Washington, a memo with a classic line -- "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." -- was fit enough to print or even highlight on their front pages.

As a consequence, the editors of the New York Review of Books took the adventurous step of doing what major mainstream publications should obviously have done. In their June 9th issue, a review of books, became the first American publication to put the document in print. (In this striking act, it was in one way typical. Along with bloggers, websites like Juan Cole's Informed Comment, and publications like the trade journal Editor & Publisher, the academic publication The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Comedy Central's The Daily Show, it broke or highlighted a story that by all rights should have been major news in the mainstream.)

Michael Kinsley, editorial and opinion editor for the Los Angeles Times, then wrote a piece typical of this mainstream moment in the Washington Post, (No Smoking Gun), discounting the importance of the Downing Street Memos as, among other things, no more than "an encouraging sign of the revival of the left. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence." Danner, in a second piece on the Downing Street Memos, also published in the New York Review of Books, offered a critique of Kinsley's piece and Kinsley responded in a letter to the Review in which he again dismissed the original memo, this time as "fairly worthless." Danner answers in the Review's upcoming August 11th issue (on newsstands next week). Their exchange follows below.

Danner writes at one point of "the widening gap between what [Americans] are told and what they see -- a gap that, when it comes to the Iraq war, is becoming harder and harder to ignore." Kinsley's letter catches something of the mood of what we are indeed being told. Another recent example involves the Plame case. For the last week, as Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald jailed a reporter and forced another to talk, as journalists pelted White House spokesman Scott McClellan with angry questions, the case spilled onto front pages everywhere, but in a remarkably obtuse way. Back on July 11, 2003, we now know, Time magazine's Matt Cooper had emailed his bureau chief that, in a conversation on "double super secret background," Karl Rove told him "it was… wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues who authorized the trip." So the question of last week became: Does identifying Joe Wilson's CIA agent/wife Valerie Plame as "wilson's wife" count as naming her.

This exchange on the July 12 Charlie Rose Show catches the near-comic tone of the moment:

"CHARLIE ROSE: So my question is, did Karl Rove ever name her specifically?

"[New York Times correspondent] RICHARD STEVENSON: Well, what he did was he alluded to her job and her role in getting her husband this job, going to Africa, but he did not use her name specifically. Whether that amounts to identifying her or not under the law is something that we don`t know, and will be up to initially the special prosecutor in the case to make a judgment on, and then ultimately, should it ever come to this, to a jury….

"CHARLIE ROSE: OK. But let me just make this clear, and I think it`s clear, but Karl Rove, according to Matt [Cooper], never identified by name Valerie, and, secondly -- Joe Wilson`s wife -- and, secondly, never said that she was a covert CIA operative. He simply said that the wife of Joe Wilson was responsible for sending him to Niger.

"RICHARD STEVENSON: Yes, that is what Matt Cooper`s e-mail to his bureau chief said. And since that`s all we have to go on, that`s where it stands right now."

As with the famed Clinton electoral campaign mantra, "It's the economy, stupid," right now reporters for major papers should just hang a giant sign over their collective computer, "It's the war, stupid." Because they haven't done so, and because the larger constitutional crisis that lurks behind the war in Iraq is little thought about, the leaking of the Downing Street Memos, the revving up of the Plame case, and other such events are dealt with, except in rare instances (as in Frank Rich's most recent New York Times column, Follow the Uranium) as discrete, unconnected events, and so all larger meaning is sucked out of them. (And then the same reporters get on television and opine that the American people won't give a fig about the complex ins-and-outs of such matters.) In this way, we're left with bizarre media spectacles like the endless discussion about whether Rove "named" Plame. (Homer Simpson would know how to respond to that one: Doh!)

I'm sorry but what planet are we on? It's like watching Medieval monks arguing over those angels on the head of a pin or the size of the camel that might indeed fit through the eye of the needle, while the world out there is actually riotously visible. And then, of course, if you want to find out why the media is this way, you have to turn to Mark Danner or Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books or Orville Schell at this site, or perhaps Jay Rosen, the creator of the PressThink blog, who just posted a remarkable piece on the Bush administration's unprecedented "rollback" policy in relation to the media; how it has "succeeded in changing the terms of engagement with journalists"; and why the sudden media assertiveness at White House press briefings is no special sign of renewed courage. (Answer, unlike the press, it's not so easy to rollback a special counsel.)

In the meantime, the largest of events are transpiring. While there is officially no means for the Bush administration to implode (impeachment not being a political possibility), nonetheless, implosion is certainly possible. If and when the unraveling begins, the proximate cause, whether the Plame affair or something else entirely, is likely to surprise us all but none more than the members of the mainstream media.

Facing the most mobilized administration in memory, possibly the greatest gamblers in American history since Jefferson Davis, men (and a woman) who -- give them credit -- look at the world through a distinctly oversized geopolitical lens, the press has, for almost four years, essentially demobilized itself. It has been incapable of connecting the dots, and so has been left arguing over whether Joe Wilson's wife and Valerie Plame were one and the same, and whether the Downing Street Memo provides "proof" of George Bush's state of mind. Fortunately, Mark Danner does exist and the New York Review of Books -- whose editors have been kind enough once again to let Tomdispatch post his latest work -- is around to print his pieces. Tom

The Memo, the Press, and the War

An Exchange between Michael Kinsley and Mark Danner

[Writing about the Iraq war and the Downing Street memo in the July 14th issue of the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner commented on a recent column by Los Angeles Times editorial and opinion editor Michael Kinsley, No Smoking Gun.(1) Mr. Kinsley has now responded. His letter and Mark Danner's reply appear below.]